Washington:
Said Mohammed Alam Shah, a 24-year-old Afghan who had lost a leg as a teenager, told interrogators at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that he had been conscripted by the Taliban as a driver before being detained in 2001. He had been caught, he said, as he tried to "rescue his younger brother from the Taliban."
Military analysts believed him. Mr. Shah, who had been outfitted with a prosthetic leg by prison doctors, was "cooperative" and "has not expressed thoughts of violence or made threats toward the U.S. or its allies," according to a sympathetic 2003 assessment. Its conclusion: "Detainee does not pose a future threat to the U.S. or U.S. interests."
So in 2004 Mr. Shah was sent back to Afghanistan -- where he promptly revealed himself to be Abdullah Mehsud, a Pakistan-born militant, and began plotting mayhem. He recorded jihadist videos, organized a Taliban force to fight American troops, planned an attack on Pakistan's interior minister that killed 31 people, oversaw the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers, and finally detonated a suicide bomb in 2007 as the Pakistani Army closed in. His martyrdom was hailed in an audio message by none other than Osama bin Laden.
The Guantánamo analysts' complete misreading of Abdullah Mehsud was included among hundreds of classified assessments of detainees at the prison in Cuba that were obtained by The New York Times. The unredacted assessments give the fullest public picture to date of the prisoners held at Guantánamo over the past nine years. They show that the United States has imprisoned hundreds of men for years without trial based on a difficult and strikingly subjective evaluation of who they were, what they had done in the past and what they might do in the future. The 704 assessment documents use the word "possibly" 387 times, "unknown" 188 times and "deceptive" 85 times.
Viewed with judges' rulings on legal challenges by detainees, the documents reveal that the analysts sometimes ignored serious flaws in the evidence -- for example, that the information came from other detainees whose mental illness made them unreliable. Some assessments quote witnesses who say they saw a detainee at a camp run by Al Qaida but omit the witnesses' record of falsehood or misidentification. They include detainees' admissions without acknowledging other government documents that show the statements were later withdrawn, often attributed to abusive treatment or torture.
A Growing Wariness Written between 2002 and 2009, the assessments reflect a growing wariness on the part of Guantánamo analysts. Early on, the reports are just a page or two and often sanguine in tone. By 2008, after scorching publicity about released detainees who joined Al Qaida and the dwindling of the prison population to hard-core detainees, the assessments are decidedly more cautious.
For every case of an Abdullah Mehsud -- someone wrongly judged a minimal threat -- there are several instances in which prisoners rated "high risk" were released and have not engaged in wrongdoing. Murat Kurnaz, a German resident of Turkish ancestry, was judged in a 2006 assessment to be a member of Al Qaida who fell into the most dangerous category: "high risk" and "likely to pose a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies."
Nonetheless, American authorities, under pressure from both Germany and Turkey, overruled the analysts and sent Mr. Kurnaz home to Germany three months later. He did not join the global jihad but instead became a prominent critic of Guantánamo, writing a book and making countless media appearances to denounce the American prison.
Among the most revealing of the leaked documents is a 17-page guide for analysts, evidently prepared by military intelligence trainers, on how to gauge the danger posed by a detainee. It lists major clusters of detainees, including the so-called Dirty 30, who were the bodyguards of Mr. bin Laden, as well as the large group of accused Qaida operatives captured with Abu Zubaydah, an important terrorist facilitator, at two guesthouses in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in 2002. It lists nine mosques associated with Al Qaida, in Quebec, Milan, London, Yemen and Pakistan.
The guide shows how analysts seized upon the tiniest details as a potential litmus test for risk. If a prisoner had a Casio F91W watch, it might be an indication he had attended a Qaida bomb-making course where such watches were handed out -- though that model is sold around the world to this day. (Likewise, the assessment of a Yemeni prisoner suggests a dire use for his pocket calculator: "Calculators may be used for indirect fire calculations such as those required for artillery fire.")
A prisoner caught without travel documents? It might mean he had been trained to discard them to make identification harder, the guide explains. A detainee who claimed to be a simple farmer or a cook, or in the honey business or searching for a wife? Those were common Taliban and Qaida cover stories, the analysts were told.
And a classic Catch-22: "Refusal to cooperate," the guide says, is a Qaida resistance technique.
Yet the guide appears to be the product of years of experience at trying to turn bits of evidence of varying reliability into a conclusion. Notably, it cites as a cautionary tale the early misjudgment about Abdullah Mehsud, the Pakistani suicide bomber, who had claimed he was forced to join the Taliban. He was "an example," the guide says, "of a detainee who successfully applied the conscription cover story as a means to secure his release from U.S. custody."
Guantánamo emerges from the documents as a nest of informants, a closed world where detainees were the main source of allegations against one another and sudden recollections of having spotted a fellow prisoner at a Qaida training camp could curry favor with interrogators. The assessments of many detainees amount to long lists of fellow prisoners' claims about them.
Among the prison's many informants, few outdid Yasim Basardah, a Yemeni whose statements are cited in the assessments of 30 detainees -- even though at least three federal judges have questioned his credibility, citing his serious psychiatric problems. (In a curious twist, a judge ordered Mr. Basardah released last year, in part because she concluded that his ties to Al Qaida had been effectively severed by his record of cooperation with American authorities. He was transferred to Spain.)
Or there is Abu Zubaydah, the Qaida facilitator who was waterboarded while in the custody of the Central Intelligence Agency and whose interrogations are cited in the risk assessments of more than 100 prisoners. His lawyers have noted that his accusations against others have been systematically removed from government filings in court cases, an indication that officials no longer are certain of his reliability.
A few assessments acknowledge the hazards of rewarding detainees for information. "Detainee admitted that he provided information in a deliberately misleading manner in order to receive incentives from his debriefers," said a report on Abdul Bukhary, a Saudi militant with a jihadist résumé stretching back to the Soviet-Afghan war. Mr. Bukhary told interrogators that "his memory was very bad," to which the analysts added a skeptical note: "Feigning memory problems is a common counter-interrogation technique."
Yet Mr. Bukhary's observations are cited in the assessments of a dozen other prisoners without any caveat about his admitted deceptions or his claim of a poor memory. And though in July 2007 Mr. Bukhary was rated "high risk" and "likely" to pose a threat to American interests, he was sent home to Saudi Arabia and its rehabilitation program for militants just two months later.
The Release Lottery The documents, originally obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks but provided to The Times by another source, portray Guantánamo as a lottery with the highest stakes for both the prisoners and their American captors. A critical factor was a detainee's country of origin. Most European inmates were sent home, despite grave qualms on the analysts' part. Saudis went home, even some of the most militant, to enter the rehabilitation program; some would graduate and then join Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. Yemenis have generally stayed put, even those cleared for release, because of the chaos in their country. Even in clearly mistaken arrests, release could be slow.
One Afghan, Mohammed Nasim, was sent to Guantánamo in May 2003 under the belief that he was a notorious Taliban military commander of the same last name. By March 2004, analysts had realized their error: "It is assessed that the detainee is a poor farmer and his arrest was due to mistaken identity." Yet, a review tribunal considered his case later that year as if he were the Taliban commander, and he was not sent home until April 2005 -- two years after he arrived at the prison.
In some cases, the analysts showed a willingness to reconsider their judgments in light of new facts. An Afghan prisoner, Shawali Khan, was caught with what appeared to be deeply incriminating documents: a Qaida training manual on assassination, surveillance and counterfeiting that even contained a plan to kidnap the American president, as well as a notebook from a Qaida camp on the maintenance and use of the AK-47 and other weapons.
The problem was that the documents were all in Arabic, and six years after his capture, Mr. Khan had finally convinced interrogators that he could not read Arabic. That conclusion, analysts wrote, "lends more credence to detainee's claim" that he had looted the material from possessions abandoned by Arab fighters who had fled Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.
A single footnote can call into question the entire case against a detainee: Abdul Haddi bin Hadiddi, a Tunisian who had spent time in Italy and was once arrested there for counterfeiting, was rated "high risk" and was believed to have received training from Al Qaida. His assessment describes phone calls by the detainee, intercepted by Italian intelligence, with gunfire in the background.
But if the Italian dates are right, the reported calls were made after Mr. Hadiddi's arrest. A footnote tries to sort it out: "If this was the detainee," it says, then the reported dates of the calls must be wrong. "If this is not the detainee, it may indicate detainee's claimed name is not his" -- an astonishing acknowledgment about a man imprisoned since August 2002.
Judges Weigh In Such frustrating case studies seem to beg for an independent evaluation of the evidence, some way of shedding light on the quality of the Guantánamo analysts' work. As it happens, federal judges have heard nearly 60 cases brought by detainees challenging their imprisonment, and they have ruled in many of them that the government's evidence was too thin or contradictory to justify holding the prisoner.
The 2008 assessment of Alla Ali bin Ali Ahmed, for instance, a Yemeni who denied that he had fought in Afghanistan, concluded that he was a "committed member of Al Qaida" who posed a "high risk" to the United States.
But a federal judge who saw all the classified evidence in the case found that all four witnesses who claimed to have seen him in Afghanistan were unreliable. (The judge, Gladys Kessler, ordered Mr. Ahmed released, and he went home to Yemen in 2009.)
One witness, Judge Kessler wrote, was said by American military doctors to be suffering from "psychosis." The assessment of that witness, a Yemeni named Musab al-Madoonee, described him as "in overall good health" and made no mention of his mental illness.
But in another case this month, another judge offered far more support for the Guantánamo analysts. Writing about another Yemeni detainee, Yasin Ismail, Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said he found the detainee's account "phonier than a $4 bill" and rejected his challenge.
Judge Silberman showed sympathy for counterterrorism analysts who erred on the side of caution. In an ordinary criminal case, a judge may vote to overturn a conviction on evidentiary grounds even if he is virtually certain the defendant is guilty, Judge Silberman wrote. With a potential terrorist, he said, the stakes are different.
"When we are dealing with detainees," Judge Silberman said, "candor obliges me to admit that one can not help but be conscious of the infinitely greater downside risk to our country, and its people, of an order releasing a detainee who is likely to return to terrorism."
By the Pentagon's count, as of Oct. 1, 2010, of the 598 detainees transferred from Guantánamo, 81 were "confirmed" and 69 "suspected" of engaging in terrorist or insurgent activities after their release. Accepting the highest Defense Department total, even the 25 percent rate would be lower than most estimates of recidivism rates for federal and state ex-convicts.
An Elusive Subject But those numbers may be one reason Guantánamo officials have been loath to take a chance in the befuddling case of Detainee 257, known as Omar Hamzayavich Abdulayev, a 32-year-old Tajik. He arrived at Guantánamo when he was just 23, a month after the prison opened. Interrogators have questioned Mr. Abdulayev for nine years, intelligence officers from both Russia and Tajikistan have visited to talk to him and countless other prisoners have been asked what they know about him.
The most serious allegations came from a Kuwaiti prisoner who claimed that Mr. Abdulayev told him he was trained by Al Qaida in poisons and explosives and had met top Qaida operatives. But the Kuwaiti's own assessment questioned his credibility, saying details of his account were "conflicting and vague."
Then there is the documentary evidence: Mr. Abdulayev was caught with notebooks containing notes on explosives and lists of mujahedeen fighters. And an undated Qaida training roster found in Afghanistan listed "Abdallah al-Uzbeki" among the trainees. An analyst, grasping for data on his elusive subject, wrote that "Abdallah" might be a variant of Abdallahyiv, a Tajik version of Abdulayev, and that al-Uzbeki "is an alias which can also be adopted by Tajiks and Afghans due to similar facial features and shared cultural beliefs and customs."
Mr. Abdulayev appears to be an example of the most controversial category of Guantánamo detainees: the 47 whom the Obama administration has judged too dangerous for release but for whom it lacks the evidence necessary to hold a military tribunal.
Hence the haunting conclusion of his 2008 assessment: "Detainee's identity remains uncertain."